Incessant Expressions

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It’s stupid humid outside right now

July 22nd, 2008 by James Westfall
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I’ve just returned from my umpteenth trip to the trash cans today and I just realized how insanely humid it is right now. Simpleweather.com only reports the temperature at 81F but a balmy 79% humidity. And normally, this would mean it’s about to rain except that it’s mostly clear skies and there’s no real breeze flowing. Why the hell is it so humid in the middle of the night? I’m literally dripping in sweat right now and it’s not all that pleasant to me but it’s too late to take a shower; you try going to sleep with 3ft of wet hair and a wet pillow, you won’t be happy!

We found some cool stuff today but since the afternoon, it’s been a total bust. We managed to score two nice little plates, a nearly full (!!!) bottle of Drano MAX (which we badly need) and a few other sundry items. But we also got rid of a set of large horizontal blinds to a nice old lady and a lady from Delray came to pick up a table a neighbor gave us Saturday night. There’s other pickups scheduled for later in the week but we’ve still got a patio full of stuff, waiting for people to claim it.

I hope they can claim it soon so we can find more goodies, I need to put my new set of convertible hand-trucks to good use!

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Sometimes, solar charging isn’t worth it

July 21st, 2008 by James Westfall
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Last week I received my Solar Technology Freeloader (I actually bought mine at Firebox.com) in hopes of eschewing my Sidekick’s charger for a solar-powered charger. Well, it got charged but it was because I used the included USB cable to charge the Freeloader’s battery not from solar charging. I’ve charged the Freeloader in the extremely abundant Florida sun twice and twice has my phone completely drained the battery in less than 15 minutes. Could this be a defective battery? Quite possibly. Do I believe it’s a defective battery? Not at all. Before I bought the Freeloader, I looked for reviews and very few actual reviews were found and those there were found were either from England OR they were reviewing the press release for the device from 2005. I should have taken this as a warning that it may not work or at least, not work so well.

This is pretty much the wrong product for someone that’s environmentally-minded. The packaging isn’t recyclable at all except for the inside box that holds the charger and cables. It’s regular paperboard without any finish. The charger itself is a mix of small photovoltaic panels (2 of them), aluminum, and plastic (whose number is not defined in the manual) and the Li-ion battery. I know the aluminum can be recycled but the rest of the device body itself is questionable. The battery is replaceable but according to the manual and agreement, an end user cannot replace the battery themselves but they can buy as many replacement batteries as they want to. Why would I buy a replacement battery that I can’t replace? It’s different if I have to take the device to the company to replace the battery a la iPhone. This really hinders any widespread adoption for the product especially since they only ship inside the UK and nowhere else for consumers. Solar Technologies may not want to pay for shipping to other countries but it seriously will limit the use of their device.

There are three LEDs on one side to show charging/discharging status and two ports on the other side for charging by USB or discharging with one of the 18 included charging tips. As instructed in the manual, my first time charging the device was using the supplied mini-USB cable to charge via my computer’s USB ports. OK, fine, I did that. It charged up in about 3 hours and then I then used the Freeloader to charge my phone. It did so for a little under 2 hours which is what the packaging materials claim. Great, I thought I’d found a reason to no longer use my wall charger. I was wrong. Since I fully discharged the Freeloader in the middle of the day, I stuck it outside to charge in direct sunlight for at least 5 hours. I had no way to tell if it was fully charged up or not since the device only uses two of the LEDs to show ’solar charge’ status although, one of the LEDs is used for showing the device charging by USB *and* it will shut off once fully charged by USB. This cannot be done via solar charging at all and is a bad product design. The LEDs never shut off when solar charging but they do with USB charging, why would it only work for one function? This confusing design aside, I still decided to use it.

After it had charged for 4-5 hours and I figured it was fully charged, I slapped on the mini-USB connector tip and plugged the charger into my phone. 10 minutes later I got a call from my dad so I unplugged the charger but once I was done I plugged it back up. Well, it was dead. Completely. No juice left at all. This was after 10 minutes of use and 4-5 hours of charging. If that length of time — which is specified in the manual to be the required solar charging time — is not sufficient then what is? I live in Florida so we get tons of strong daylight year round but am I supposed to believe that I need to leave this outside for 8+ hours to charge when the manual does state that’s not needed? There’s an “add on” called the Supercharger however I’m not sure what its purpose is at all. Solar Technologies claims it can charger the Freeloader in as little as 4 hours — the manual states it can charge itself in as little as 5 hours — and their other promo material states it can charge the Freeloader in “half the time”. Half of what? 4 hours is not half of 5 hours by any math I know of. Overall, the Freeloader doesn’t meet expectations or even what’s in the manual.

The build quality isn’t all that great either. The device is comprised of plastic clamshelled inside thin aluminum which should add at least some structural rigidity and protection. While I don’t plan on dropping this to find out the latter part, I know that the product feels very cheap overall. The solar panel portions of the device can easily torsion from side-to-side which means you could very simply snap them if you accidentally sat on them. Yes, I know they’re glass but I’m talking about when the solar panel halves are put together! Overall build quality simply feels cheap and does not give the end user a great deal of insurance that their Freeloader won’t simply fall to bits if it’s dropped from small heights.

Friday, the 18th, I left my charger in the car all day charging. To my surprise one of the solar panel’s plastics had warped in the sun. It warped in such a way to actually push part of the panel out of the battery compartment (they’re push-connected like pushing a phone charger tip into a cell phone) and so it wasn’t charging properly. I did not know when this had happened or if it was affecting the ability to charge. So when I plugged my Freeloader into my phone, I gave it a 15 minute time limit before I would check it again. Sadly, it didn’t last 12 minutes. And this was after charging in direct sunlight for over 6 hours — remember, 5 is all that’s required according to the manual. So either I’ve gotten a defective unit or this just doesn’t work in the first place. The device manual says it supports iPods (up to 18 hours) and PSPs (up to 2.5 hours) but I can’t get it to charge my cell phone for more than 15 minutes, how it will do anything more demanding like a PSP is completely beyond me.

I was extremely disappointed by this solar charger. I haven’t been this letdown by a product in a long time. I should have known from the very small number of in-person product reviews that either it was a bum product or a gimmick or simply no one bought it. Now I know that it was both the former and the latter. With seemingly poor quality control done on these, I can’t feel comfortable charging my device in the sun any longer for fear or warping one of the other connections and it no longer charging at all or simply short circuiting completely. I am not going to request an exchange from Firebox because I don’t want to wait another week for the device that may or may not work; a refund will suffice. I will then use this money towards another solar charger such as the Solio or Solio Hybrid 1000HD.

Would I ever buy a product from Solar Technology again? Not if my life depended on it. If I’m going to use a product such as the Freeloader to charge my electronic devices, well, it better do just that.

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Dictionaries did not explode in printing presses

July 20th, 2008 by James Westfall
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This is an IDer’s explanation that God, without question, exists. He states early in the video that the most minute portion of anything in the physical universe is explainable by a mind behind it. So rocks and atoms have minds behind them. Is there a planet of rock people sending their prisoners here for us to see rocks? And apparently, rocks have a moral stance behind them and they’re spiritual. OK, rocks aren’t mentioned explicitly but you can substitute any non-man-made but physical item in the Universe.

Around 2:10 in, this creationist is stating that the human enzyme is proof of God. I want to know how this explains palm trees and Kentucky bluegrass (the grass not the music). He also posits (about 3:40 in) that there are 4 “fundamental questions” in life which only have three answers. So, what happened to that final answer? There’s an imbalanced ratio here.

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How can FAU strive to keep kids on campus?

July 20th, 2008 by James Westfall
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Perusing my nearly week’s worth of unread feeds, I came across this article about upcoming efforts to keep Florida Atlantic University’s resident students on campus more. I think this is a step in the right direction for FAU to try and start competing on a higher level for students from other state universities. Charles Brown, FAU’s dean of student affairs (we have a dean for student affairs?! I thought it would have a director not a dean), is working to concoct ways of keeping those resident students residing over the weekend.

As a commuter student and former employee at Boca’s other University, this is going to be a very hard sell. At Lynn University, most resident students stayed for the weekend for entirely different reasons than FAU students may: over 90% of resident students aren’t from Florida. I worked there for almost three years and came face-to-face with students everyday of that time and nearly none of them were actually from Florida, let alone the South Florida area. Many of these students’ parents could easily afford weekly jet flights back home so their kids could jaunt around with their hometown chums but many didn’t because Boca has a number of underage-friendly clubs where it’s easy to party all weekend– the only extracurricular activity a huge portion of these students ever participate in and weekends start on Wednesday night. They figured it was easier to stay in town to get in trouble and have fun, well out of the reach of their parents.

This is the complete opposite of much of FAU’s student body from what I’ve noticed. I’ve encountered a marginal handful of foreign and exchange students and students from other states but the majority are Floridians and most of those are from counties surrounding Palm Beach that didn’t (or couldn’t) go to UF or FSU. With friends and parents only minutes or hours away, many resident students see no reason to stay in town. And I can’t blame them as many of FAU’s student activities are not only poorly advertised but are poorly organized. The most prominent flyers you will see on campus at any given time are for bars and college night specials; I only know this because they’re the highest profile litter on the entire campus much to my dismay. You can’t walk to any class or building without seeing at least a dozen of these things and in that same amount of time, you may see 4 or 5 fliers for student activities. And the bigger problem with student flyers is they have a very low circulation. When I walk from the SO building (social sciences and Jewish studies) to the Breezeway (our campus’s student focal point) for a cup of coffee, I will see flyers for different activities at both buildings but rarely any for the same activity at both buildings. And how hard would it be to distribute them to both buildings? Stupefyingly easy as the buildings are only about 150 feet apart.

This is only part of the problem, the other problem is any actual promotion of events. FAU’s MyFAU portal for both students and faculty members does an extremely poor job of promoting events by both students and the college alike. I get more information on what the college is putting on from fauevents.com (owned by the school) or from the Boca Raton News’ RSS feed than I do from the school’s own internal information portal. Sad, I know. Student events are even less prominent on MyFAU. There’s more information on getting a physical at the school’s clinic than there are about the numerous fashion shows during any given semester. My girlfriend has missed many opportunities to both see and photograph these fashion shows because she never saw any promotion for them, she only found out about them by passing by or by simply hearing the music being played. And this year’s Battle of the Bands? Besides the fact that the bands were complete rubbish, there were more people in bands and playing then there were in attendance and students were walking right past without even giving one moment’s thought to what was going on. We only saw the flyer for the show the day of the show and because we overheard it at the library while researching for one of my papers. I would have been far more apt to attend this free event if I’d known about it, either by more prominently displayed flyers or a blurb on MyFAU.

So now Dean Brown has now set lofty goals for himself and his department. He wants to increase visibility for events in order to keep current students and recruit future students. Some of this will definitely be helped by FAU’s football team being the only Florida university to win a bowl game this year so weekend football attendance will definitely increase. But what about other activities? Since he’s the head of student affairs, he always has a throng of students working for him to help promote student activities so how is he going to make up for this apparent past failure? I’m not sure but I know that at Lynn, most students knew exactly what was going on during the week and weekend because of the student activities department. I worked with those guys quite frequently and they had a great handle on getting the word out on what’s happening. Between student-based promotions at local clubs such as Club Boca or Club 99/Aqua, there were big bright flyers all over the place for everything that went on. Dean Brown could take a cue or two from Jen Herzog, the former director of student affairs at Lynn. I know full well that activities are promoted most heavily to the social group most interested in the event itself but what about the rest of the student population? Those previously mentioned fashion shows were almost solely only promoted and represented to the cliques putting them on, in this case the minority sororities that conduct many events throughout the year. Much of what’s done is by word of mouth and in their own social cliques but there’s little other promotion done.

How will Brown combat this and make sure a real effort is given to spreading the word? Do we need event street teams? Do we need better promo materials? What about promotion outside the campus for commuter students (although, this is not the focal point of the new-found focus of Dean Brown’s vision)? Or better promotions at the places students frequent the most like the clubs and hookah bars around town? I don’t know what he has planned but I know the most forward-facing promotional venue he needs is staring him and every student and faculty member right in the face: MyFAU. Everyone has to use this portal during school sessions for everything from email to online classes so I hope he’s going to make better use of the free publicity. Or maybe he’ll have student affairs send email blasts to resident students about upcoming events. I know, it’d pretty much be spam but remember, people do read and respond to spam occasionally. Since we’re looking to start a club in the fall, any increased efforts that Brown and his department can or will make can only serve to help us and other clubs out that want to plan weekend activities.

FAU is going through its growing pains from a commuter-focused school to a more residential-focus school and that’s going to take some time to adjust to. When the largest portion of your students — and finances — are from off campus students, you have to make every dime worth it to get your residents to hang around. And there’s truly no limit to any possibility of activities to hold either: movie nights (either on campus or a quick jaunt over to Muvico or Sunrise Cinemas Mizner, both are roughly 5 minutes from campus), gaming competitions, MXC-style games, campus- or city-wide litter clean-up efforts, volunteer programs, fashion shows, speakers and panels on important and upcoming issues (these occur very often but they’re almost solely in the middle of the day during the week), art shows, plays, and so on. With 2500+ resident students and many more thousand commuters, the available options of what to do to keep us hanging around are in fact nearly infinite. I can’t count how many there’s been a speaker or panel on something interesting or salient that I wanted to attend but could not since they’re all during my work day. If some of these were shifted to the weekends, far more people would be willing to show up. And since there’s nearly no classes on Fridays, this is a pretty obvious time and place to put these events.

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Long awaited Sidekick LX OTA finally arrived

July 17th, 2008 by James Westfall
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Since June, there’s been a new OTA update floating around for the LX/Slides and it’s supposed to be this fanciful awesome new thing. Problem is it was (and probably still is) in the “pioneer” roll-out stage. The “pioneer” stage is set up for dedicated users, hardcore Sidekick lovers, and other people that T-Mobile/Danger like to get the update first. This has been on-going since June 25th, the official release of the newest OTA update. So far, only scant details about what the update provides are known and most users are clamouring to get it because it finally includes video recording. Great, it’s rubbish and useless, also has no sound output. More on that shortly. I’m glad I finally got the update but not for the video recording.

What I’m glad the update provided was a slightly faster UI experience and a much improved load time for viewing pictures from the microSD media. Typically using the microSD as storage lead to insanely slow load times in the photo album viewer and for no good reason. It seems they’ve added precaching for thumbnail generation. Danger also overhauled the capture UI from the mostly unobtrusive overlay with a few icons on the bottom right-hand corner to an overly obtrusive iconified stack taking up the right-hand portion of the UI. Great, now I get to lose valuable screen space for composition to useless icons. They’ve vignetted the whole capture screen to accommodate the icons by adding small black bars to the left and right sides, similar to what you see on an HDTV while watching a non-stretched SD channel. Why? This is completely pointless. This could’ve been achieved simply by adding extra icons to the out-of-the-way UI that was previously in place. It’s a case of over-engineering. I’m just glad the media viewer app is faster.

On to the video. As other sites have commented, the video quality is absolute rubbish for a non-VGA camera. Video composition is made difficult by the previous UI changes and because the viewfinder scrunches up the entire video to fit into a tiny square, not very user-friendly to me. Videos also lack sound. While this can be a deal breaker for some people, I don’t care because I can take better snapshots in rapid succession to produce a better animated GIF than I can shoot a video. Videos can only be 20 seconds long and are 176×144 in size. That’s basically useless for resolution although I’m sure longer video lengths will be added in the future. Video was added because so many users were asking for it, frankly it should’ve been left out until the next revision (not the Sidekick 2008 but whatever model will be next with 3G). My girlfriend had a really cheap webcam about 8 years ago that shot better video than this, with a cheaper VGA processor and comparable optics. It’s fairly useless.

Overall, there are some nice overall UI changes. MMS views haven’t changed but there was a slight change to the SMS UI in that the little preview box at the bottom now says “Highlight a message to preview.” Can’t say this is really needed but then again, some users need hand-holding on why there’s a white box taking up half the screen. Email viewing has changed slightly and I do mean slightly. The only change is when viewing an email, you’re shown a gradient-colored header versus the old blue-hued one. Small changed but it’s OK. The Address Book app got a makeover as well. It now has 4 tabs: All (contacts), Favorites (contacts), Recent Calls, and Online Now. The addition of tabs are the only change. The first three tabs can be useful but the last tab is useless because if you’re already signed into one of the IM clients, you know if one of your contacts is already online, you don’t need a tab to tell you that.

Apparently the IM clients got updated but I can’t tell at all. All I use is the AIM client and it feels the same. They did get new icons though, I suppose that’s a good thing. This was supposed to be a massive update since it’s the first one released for the nearly year-old models when in fact, other than slight UI changes, most of the work was put into having useless video recording. There’s also the option of now installing applications without having to restart the device to use them which is nice if you actually install any of the apps. Given that I only use the SSH app and none of the others slightly intrigue me, I’m not the target market for that.

A lot more could’ve been done with this update. How about finally making the calendar useful to use and input data into? There are threads upon threads on Danger’s own Sidekick-centric site about this and these requests are constantly ignored. When will there be any online calendar syncing? This has been a request that’s been on their forums since late 2005 from what I can see. Given that all of the major online calendar apps have open APIs or use iCal for exporting, I see no reason why we can’t sync Google Calendar or Live’s calendar. There are workarounds for this but they’re not streamlined and are kludgey at best. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were said to be utterly guffawing over the Sidekick 2 back when it came out and there was a lot of possibility for them to outright purchase Danger or partner with them for applications. That went absolutely nowhere. One thing I miss about my Dash is that I had GooSync to sync my Google Calendars to my phone. It wasn’t free and it wasn’t automatic but it was way better than nothing at all. If people think the Blackberry or iPhone have a closed architecture ensconced in a very high walled garden, they’ve never used a Sidekick.

I love my LX to death and I’m happy I finally got the update but it seems like a stop-gap until the next release which, given T-mo’s national roll-out of 3G coming in just 2 months, can certainly only be less than a year away. If not, T-mo will lose Sidekick users to other phones quite easily and lose a market share of the only phone they have that’s unique to their carrier.

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The Giant’s Shoulders #1

July 16th, 2008 by James Westfall
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The inaugural edition of the new blog carnival based on history of science The Giant’s Shoulders is now up at A Block Around The Clock, another excellet scienceblogs.com member.

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Carnival of the Green #136

July 15th, 2008 by James Westfall
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The newest Carnival of the Green is up at AIDG!

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Pope preaches environmental stewardship

July 15th, 2008 by James Westfall
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This is something I can finally agree on, without issue, with Catholics: the Pope preaches to Australian Catholics about climate change (WSJ, sub. not required!). I’m fairly certain this will be the only time I agree with Catholics, or even the Pope, on an issue that’s actually important.

Thankfully this isn’t one of those brain-dead “God did/said it” speeches and makes humans solely responsible for their actions, Pope Benedict XVI uses Biblical messages to promote stewardship and engender care for the environment. I can’t find any specifics on exactly what he said just yet (I haven’t found an online transcript) but I’m sure he used things such as tithing in part of planning for his speech itself. See, tithing isn’t just about giving money to the church/clergy but also about community. The men who wrote the Bible understood that the message of sharing and donation were important which is why they stated all men who are able, should leave a portion of their crops for harvest by those who are needy or cannot afford to buy food stuffs (see Deut. 26:10-13). This was especially important in regards to Levites and Levite Priests but applies just as aptly to the poor, widowed, homeless, and outcasts.

Of course, this doesn’t mean much today as I doubt Catholics want to tithe to Jewish priests but the point is still the same: help people. The Pope was preaching his message heaviest to those who will make the most difference long term, young Catholics. Other leaders and companies need to take a lesson from this as for many products and issues are pitched at the wrong age groups. The most impressionable age group will be from roughly 12-30 since they will grow up learning that taking care of the environment is important and that will reflect later on in their life choices. It’s important to get this message out to as many as possible but like many things, it’s important to get this ingrained into the minds of kids as they will undoubtedly carry the most weight and purchasing power during the periods of when this is most important. Pushing EVs and hybrids to adults is important and a smart move as they have the buying power to get companies to recognize trends but making sure kids understand this same thing is more important as they’ll be far more likely to want to purchase an EV once they can drive or can purchase their first car (EVs are just an easy example but it’s applicable everywhere).

Movement in masses is exactly why (most) politicians try and up-play the younger generation, those freshly able to vote in their first Presidential race or Congressional elections. Companies should make the same moves, although more intelligently since they can have limitless coffers of money to spend on surveys and focus groups of 16-24 year olds. If politicians can wrap their heads around things like Twitter and Myspace, what’s stopping Toyota or Nissan or GM from listening to their customers and creating truly earth-friendly products, especially when money is involved? Or making best use of the mediums available to them for information dissemination and gathering? With mountains of free and readily available data, they’d be foolhardy to not heed it, even in the least amount possible.

Recent movements in Southern Baptist circles, the Religious Right, and Catholics are stirring to get their constituents involved more as the Bible clearly has messages about caring for the earth and fellow man. I may not agree with the overall message and its delivery but I do agree that getting more people on board the “green”, sustainable, “hippie”, environmental, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement is going to make a lot of important sit up and take notice. Companies understand what their customers want through marketing and surveys but they’ll understand what’s important to us a lot more if we start allocating spending dollars to more sustainable products and methods. They’ll switch over to get our money a lot quicker than if they had simply listened to market test groups and survey results.

I’m not sure where the Popeplane is touching down again but now that the G8 summit has concluded, one can be certain that he’ll be making more environmentally-focused speeches in the short-term and reaching out to the young Catholics at hand to try and make a difference, or try and convince their parents or politicians or companies to make a difference. Whatever he says to those ends is what matters and raising awareness is the biggest hurdle that we all have to deal with.

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Farms and free food

July 11th, 2008 by James Westfall
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This weekend, we’re planning our first trip to D&D Farms for some fresh veggies that we’ll hopefully be picking ourselves. If not, I won’t have a heart attack. I’m mainly interested in bulking up my meager supply of dried peppers. Right now, I’ve only got about a dozen red chilis, jalapenos, and cherry peppers that I’ve dried for food additives. I hope to add at least a pound or more to that come Saturday. Maybe we’ll come home with some more juicy heirloom tomatoes and some fruit if they have any. I can’t wait to bring home inexpensive fresh produce, makes me wish I had room to do a little urban farming!

And this brings me to another point: food prices, right now, suck. I understand that prices of fresh foods such as fruits and vegetables will swing frequently due to market prices but at least we can still get the same amount of food for relatively the same cost versus what packaged food producers are now doing with the Grocery Shrink Ray (TM); consumers get to pay the same price for reduced portions. A big problem is that big box stores such as Publix, Winn-Dixie, and Wal-Mart don’t support the local farmers that exist in just about every state of the Union (OK, I know that Wal-Mart just recently became the single largest purchaser of locally grown foods). Being a locavore or slow food supporter definitely has its upside in that you can typically pay less for more food. But not everyone has this available to them — to their knowledge — and now food banks such as Farm Share are taking huge hits due to increased reliance on them by consumers. Farm Share supports residents in every county in Florida but cannot keep up with current rising demands for fresh foods and declining donations.

Why is this happening now?

The easiest answer is because of gas prices going up, increasing the cost of food shipment, food farming and production. But this is simply the easiest answer to an upward trend that’s been going on for a few years now. As more major farms are switching from food stream farming to farming for biofuels, supply of foods has decreased and the market price has had to adjust accordingly. And this goes beyond fruits and vegetables, it too extends to the various meat industries as they have many of the same costs and production to do. The long answer goes beyond this as it’s a more complex issue than I’m going to devote to here. With more people having to change jobs, or get second jobs, just to have money to get gas to get to work and pay the bills, family food budgets are getting cut. This means that more low-income families are having to rely on free food stuffs from places such as Farm Share but with supplies going to 67 counties, your resources wear thin quickly (especially when it’s costing you more to get food to other counties). Farm Share is having to reach out to more local growers and communities for help because they say people don’t want canned foods but instead want fresh foods. I understand that fresh foods are more preferable to something from a can but if you’re getting food assistance, can you really afford to be picky when your kids may not be able to eat? If I can get enough cans of green beans to feed my family for a few weeks but can only get enough fresh beans to feed them for a few meals, do you think I’m going to turn down packaged foods over fresh? Don’t bet your life on it.

What can be done to help out the food banks?

People can do a lot without much effort. If you’re a farmer, donate part of your crops. Let’s face it, you won’t sell or consume 100% of it anyway, let the extras help others. If you’re just a concerned citizen, donate whatever you can, monetarily or not. Get your local grocer to support local growers in order to help curb costs. Or go to your local farm and get your food at or below cost while supporting your local growers (farms are everywhere in this country, we even have them here in Boca, just a few miles away). If you can help get local foods into your local stores, you can help control the overhead on foods and this will help everyone that shops there. Start programs to re-introduce people to growing their own foods (which is part of the problem in the first place). Farming small vegetables like peppers and lettuces or fruits like tomatoes and key limes can be accomplished in nearly any urban setting if one devotes space to it. Urban farming initiatives are spreading pretty rapidly on the West Coast with it finally catching steam in the North and Northeast. Petitions can be made to cities to develop unused lands as small urban farms in order to help feed the community and bring them closer together. This can be especially effective in low-income areas with small open grassy areas that are often overlooked or forgotten about and thus, will also help feed just those who are straining already strained food banks. This would be a win-win since people can get the fresh foods they desire and if enough is left over, donate food stuffs to those who’ve helped them in the past and keep the circle going.

While I had no idea Farm Share was actually having a problem, I’m going to do what I can to help them. With the huge bevy of farmers here in South Florida, I hope that Farm Share’s dire state will convince them to look past making money and start looking at their neighbors who can no longer afford to feed their families. Or maybe some of those very same farmers will donate portions of their land to help families in need cultivate and harvest food to eat, that’d be an even better outcome.

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A win in the war against cotton

July 11th, 2008 by James Westfall
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HAIL SATIN

All you other textiles beware, Satinism is on the loose. The comments are pretty funny as well.

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